Where the iPhone doesn't work

As a very proud iPhone owner, I have been ridiculously enthusiastic after just a week of ownership. But I now realise why not everyone is bouncing off the ceiling about Apple's latest mobile wonder.

I put it down to being spoilt by living in the Thames Valley. I am only a few miles from the headquarters of O2 and 3; and Vodafone is only a 30 minute drive up the road. The area is awash with technology companies and I have never been short of a mobile phone signal or gadget fiends to show off the latest innovations to.

Now I realise how pampered I have been by taking access to 3G and wi-fi for granted, as I have just spent my second week of iPhone custodianship in Yorkshire and the Lake District. And guess what? All the fantastic things I have amazed people with over the past week no longer work.

I was genuine curious as to how a trip round the UK, turning up in remote towns with a tent, could be improved by such a slick device with a suite of neat geo-location based applications. Before I started my trip I spoke with Matthew Brazil of Socially Minded and suggested a good blog post would be how much a road trip like this could be improved with apps that tell me where I am, where the nearest restaurants are, what there is to see locally and who else is social networking nearby with their iPhone. But the reality is, all those great things need a fat data connection to provide the data that supports your GPS-defined location. Without an ability to download Google Maps over the internet, you can't see where you are on a map like you can in Maidenhead (where you arguably o not nee that information quite as much); you can't find who else is on Whoshere because you can't get the net to identify people like you can in Reading. Even the Yahoo! fed weather applicattion is useless if you are stuck on a campsite next to Coniston Water, dying to know when the rain will stop but prevented from doing so by the mountains around you. GPRS is SO slow as to make internet use on a mobile phone completely unworkable.

I was hoping my trip would be revolutionised, enabling me to have access to a wealth of information that would really enhance my trip. Instead I am reminded how lucky those of us who live in highly connected areas are; and how the fantastic range of applications on the iPhone are fundamentally underpinned by the quality of the internet connection behind them. Take that away -- and many in the UK never had them in the first place -- and the apps, and iPhone, become useless.

Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz